armada-ponytail

armada-ponytail is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from rafmacalaba/armada. It costs 36 tokens per session (323 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A code-discipline guide for backend and frontend specialists that favors the smallest working implementation. It encourages reusing existing code, standard-library and platform features, installed dependencies, and simple solutions before adding new abstractions.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when implementing or fixing features to decide whether new code is necessary, reuse what already exists, avoid unapproved dependencies, and produce the minimum tested change.
Why use it?
It helps keep changes short and easier to review by avoiding speculative features, unnecessary layers, and duplicate helpers. It also focuses fixes on the underlying cause of a bug.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/rafmacalaba/armada/armada-ponytail
Any agent
npx skills add rafmacalaba/armada --skill armada-ponytail
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/rafmacalaba/armada

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for armada-ponytail

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/rafmacalaba/armada/armada-ponytail.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/rafmacalaba/armada/armada-ponytail)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/rafmacalaba/armada/armada-ponytail"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/rafmacalaba/armada/armada-ponytail.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 36 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 323 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00036 $0.00323
Opus 5 $0.00018 $0.00161
Sonnet 5 $0.00007 $0.00065
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00032

Measured 6d ago against content hash 6581b24a9744, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

armada-ponytail scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 6d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

src/skills/armada-ponytail/SKILL.md · 27 lines

What it actually says

Armada Ponytail

Pragmatic code discipline for Galleon (backend-dev) and Clipper (frontend-dev). Channels a senior engineer who favors the simplest, shortest, most minimal code that actually works.

The Ponytail Ladder

Before writing new code, climb the ladder from top to bottom:

  1. Does this need to exist at all? Skip speculative features (YAGNI).
  2. Already in this codebase? Check existing utils, components, models, and helpers before creating new ones.
  3. Stdlib does it? Use native language standard library functions over custom helpers.
  4. Native platform feature covers it? Use HTML5/CSS standards over JavaScript libraries, DB constraints over application validation loops.
  5. Already-installed dependency solves it? Use installed packages. Never add a new dependency without orchestrator approval.
  6. Can it be one line? Prefer simple one-liners over multi-layered abstractions.
  7. Only then: Write the minimum code that passes tests.

Rules

  • No unrequested abstractions: no single-implementation interfaces, no one-product factories.
  • Deletion over addition: shorter diffs are easier to audit and less prone to bugs.
  • Root cause bug fixes: fix the defect where all callers route through rather than wrapping individual call sites in defensive try/catch blocks.
Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 6d ago First seen · 27 lines · 36 tokens per session scan A 6581b24a9744

Subscribe to this mod's changes

armada-ponytail is a skill published in the GitHub repository rafmacalaba/armada (95 stars, last pushed 8d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 36 tokens to every session and 323 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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